Most resort towns grow. Piriapolis was drawn. In the last years of the nineteenth century the entrepreneur Francisco Piria acquired a stretch of the Uruguayan coast between Montevideo and Punta del Este and set out to create a complete holiday destination, laying out streets, planting hillsides, building a grand hotel on the seafront and marketing the result to the middle classes of the River Plate. The plan still governs the town: a long curved bay, a promenade facing the water, low blocks behind it, and the granite hills of Cerro San Antonio and Cerro del Toro rising immediately inland, one of them served by a chairlift that carries visitors to a view across the whole coast. Piria's own residence, now a museum, stands nearby, and the resort has kept an early twentieth-century atmosphere that later developments elsewhere on the coast have lost. The film portrays Piriapolis in season and out, as architecture, as landscape and as a case study in the deliberate invention of a holiday town.
